January 24, 2009: Jenn and Angelo Come to Visit

I was really not ready to get up this morning when the alarm rang at a quarter till seven, but I knew that the deployments this morning were high priority so I got down to the basement and got to work.  Oreo came down to the basement pretty quickly so that he could sleep on his pillow by my feet.

Dominica and Liesl got up much earlier than I would have expected.  They were awake around eight thirty.

My Saturday morning work went much longer than I had expected.  Normally it only takes an hour or two.  Today we started quite early and then went until after ten and did a little more work after noon.  After doing that work I still had my weekend maintenance work to do, but that is not nearly as time sensitive.  We do all of our security work on the weekends for safety reasons.  So pretty much every weekend involved applying security patches, bug fixes, etc. to system files.

I wrapped up just in time to help with some house cleaning, watch Liesl for a while and then to run down to the Beach Shopping Center to take care of some errands while Dominica took care of Liesl.  I had to run to the post office as we are not sure how to send out mail without going to the post office.  Unfortunately we also need stamps as we are out of them but we don’t know where we can buy any since the post office where we send mail is an unmanned post office box station without an automated stamp machine.

While I was at the shopping center I ran into GameStop real quickly and traded in Blazing Angels for the Wii and picked up Lost Odyssey for the XBOX 360 and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories for the PSP.  I also picked up two additional Wii controllers.  We had three before but one of them died completely on us and it needed to be replaced and we really need to have four controllers for when people want to use the Wii as a party system.  Now we are fully stocked.

I got back to the house and Jenn and Angelo had just arrived about five to ten minutes ahead of me so my timing wasn’t too bad.  They met Liesl, got the house tour and then after we hung out for a little bit we packed up the kids (Liesl and Oreo) and drove out to New City Diner to get some lunch.  Dominica and I haven’t been out to New City in several weeks.  We have been missing the menu.

After lunch we hung out at the house for a little while then Jenn and Angelo took off to go visit family in New Jersey.  Dominica spent the afternoon trying out her newish game, Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None for the Wii.  I tried playing a little Final Fantasy III but didn’t have a chance to get anywhere before it was time to eat, feed Liesl, walk Oreo, feed Oreo, walk Oreo, feed Oreo, walk Or….  So I gave up trying to play and went down to work in the basement for another few hours to wrap up the work that I was not able to complete this morning.

I wrapped up work at ten thirty tonight.  I did get a chance to talk to Jorge Maldonado over FB IM tonight for an hour or so.  We just found each other on FaceBook about a week ago and this was our first chance to talk.  We went to middle school together at Pavilion Baptist School in 1988-1990.  We went to different high schools, I went to York and he went to Mt. Morris, and we didn’t see each other during our high school years.  It has been nineteen years since we have spoken!

I decided that tonight was a necessary “turn in early” night.  Just in case I get paged tonight I need to get to bed early.  I have gotten very little sleep this week and it is really wearing on me.

Wii Fit: First Impressions

We first got the Wii Fit almost immediately after its release with the intent of it being a Christmas present.  We did not end up unpacking the Wii Fit or setting it up until quite some time later and just now have been using it for three days.

Nintendo’s Wii Fit is a combination of exercise software and the Wii Balance Board accessory.  Wii Fit itself is pretty basic and is not a game as many people probably believe that it is.  The Balance Board is actually a very advanced scale that connects wirelessly to the Nintendo Wii and tracks not only total weight but also the placement of weight upon the scale.

First, the scale.  The Balance Board works great, even on carpeting.  We compared weights measured on it in our living room on thick carpeting versus weights measured on a regular bathroom scale on linoleum and the weights were exactly the same.  The balance aspect of the board works well too with it being quite responsive.  I am sure that it would work even more accurately on a harder surface but on the carpet it does just fine.  The scale is attractive and works well in our living room.  It easily slides under furniture so that it is out of the way while not in use.

Secondly, Wii Fit itself.  Wii Fit turned out to be a more interesting fitness program than I had anticipated.  It has two modes, one for tracking your weight and BMI progress and one for being your personal trainer doing balance, cardio and strength training.  The “game” even teaches you some basic yoga.

I enjoy doing the exercises with the Wii Fit.  It is easy to use and does interesting workouts that you would normally not do at home.  Having the handy in-game trainer stepping you through things makes it feel more interactive and the exercises have cute visualizations to make them more enjoyable.  For example, when jogging in place your jogging actually propels a rendered jogger forward through a three dimensional terrain which helps you to pass the time while keeping you motivated.

One of the most useful tools of the Wii Fit is its record keeping.  You can weight in every day or every few days and have the balance board automatically weight you and chart your weight and BMI progress along with tracking goals.  By making the process of weighing in and keeping track so easy it really encourages you to do it every day.  Seeing progress on a graph makes it easy to quickly tell how you are doing.

Something that was really smart with Wii Fit was the ability to install the Wii Fit channel directly to your Wii menu.  You cannot use this channel for your training, that requires the Wii Fit disc to be in the drive, but you can use this channel to do your daily weigh in.  So all you have to do is to turn on the Wii, stand on the scale and turn it back off.  No looking for the disc, switching discs from what the kids are playing, etc.  Nice and easy to encourage you to do it every day.

What currently we are waiting for is additional games to be released that will take advantage of the Wii Balance Board.  It is an expensive accessory and it would be nice if it had some extra uses.  At this time there are a total of nine titles (plus Wii Fit itself) that can make use of the balance board but, unfortunately, they are almost exclusively the “third party dump” titles (the stuff that is dumped to the Wii that was deemed unfit for the more serious consoles in the hopes of duping the gullible casual gamer market) and Wii Music (widely reviewed as the worst game of 2008 even though it is a Nintendo published title.)  So the lineup is weak to say the least and several of those titles only support the board as an afterthought and not as a core game feature.  The one really notable exception is Shaun White Snowboarding: Road Trip which is supposed to be a lot of fun.  We are planning to get that and try it out.

Coming out soon and quite anticipated is EA Sports Active which is a competitor for the Wii Fit program but is designed to take advantage more of the controllers than of the balance board but it will support the balance board as well.  We should see that exercise title in about two months.

What I am interested to see is some games release that really doing something innovative with the balance board – using it in real gameplay for something other than skiing or snowboarding titles which are simply too obvious and, at this point, very well covered.

So far the Wii Fit is fun and with its recent $50 price drop it is not a bad buy for most people.  If you are looking for a way to get some exercise in a fun, original way then check it out.

January 23, 2009: Another Busy Friday

Another early, cold, exhausted morning.  I can’t wait until Sunday when I actually get to sleep in a little bit.  Although, of course, the joke around the office is that the production data center will go down on Saturday as developer and contingency have gone down the last two weekends like clockwork.  If so, no sleep here.

Dominica got a chance to talk to her job in New Jersey (she has been on maturnity leave which is set to end soon) yesterday.  When she left there was a discussion about the possibility of her working from home, possibly part time.  That would be highly dependent both upon them remaining short of staff after all of this time and that they would have implemented a work from home technology solution.  That is on top of the need just to get approval for someone to work from home.  So we were not planning on this in any way but the final decision was not being made until yesterday.  So we officially know now that Dominica is not going back to work (there is no way for her to drive that far to the office.)  She will be focusing now on her certificate in System Administration and her second bachelor’s degree until she finds a really interesting work from home position – which could be a very long time.

Today was fairly busy at work.  Working the early shift on Friday always makes for a really long day since I am always stuck working quite late regardless of when I start in the morning.  Today was no exception and I worked until around seven in the evening.  Good for overtime but bad for getting a chance to relax.

We are dinner and finished watching the third season of the Mary Tyler Moore Show.  The third season is the where MTM starting falling apart wearing more and more outrageously hideous outfits (she was always the example of managing to pull off unflattering clothing but in this season it got away from her and she was constantly upstaged by Valerie Harper no matter how much dressing down they tried to do to her to keep Mary looking better), caking on makeup so that even on non-DVD based viewing of the show it looks like crusty gunk on her face and then, to top it all, towards the end of the third season suddenly she barely looks like the same person (or a person at all) after she undergoes a very obviously failed face-lift.

It is so sad that MTM could go from sex symbol on the Dick Van Dyke show and in less than a decade be a poster child for celebrities who panic and destroy their looks thinking that surgery will keep them looking young.  Now websites call her the “cryptkeeper” as she has undergone one surgery after another and looks completely inhuman.  She has managed to make herself look like she is Michael Jackson’s real mother.  So sad.  It is extra sad when you realize that she was in her mid-thirties then and that she is now in her seventies.  She has lived half of her life with a surgically altered face and the vast majority of her adult life with it.

After finished the MTM show we watched some of Lou Grant, a spinoff series featuring Ed Asner as the city desk editor for the LA Tribune.  It was a highly award winning show with a good cast that was eventually pulled from the air because the network on which it was running supported the US invasion of El Salvador and Ed Asner did not.  Sad that the few good shows out there are at risk because someone has principles.  I suppose that it is more sad that good people lost their jobs because the network took the moral low ground.  The show is good.  It is an hour long drama instead of a half hour sitcom.  I am looking forward to watching it.  Ed Asner is a really great actor.

While we were watching Hulu, I also worked on finishing Final Fantasy III.  That did not end up working out, though.  I made it all of the way to the end of the game, right to the very final battle, and then I died.  Hours of gameplay without a chance to save!  🙁  It would not have been hours of gameplay for normal people but having a dog and a baby who need constant attention it takes hours to do anything.  I am still hopeful that I can finish the game tomorrow.  I have so many Nintendo DS and GBA games that I want to play but I am attempting to limit myself to playing only one at a time.  I used to play several at once and that made for a lot of confusion and a lot of never finishing games.  Recently my gameplay habits have changed completely and I am getting good at actually finishing things.

Tomorrow morning I am getting up at a quarter until seven to start work.  Then, once work is done, the next job is house cleaning since Jenn and Angelo will be arriving sometime around noonish.  Sunday I do not have anything scheduled – yet.  I really need the day off.

I started working with Groovy and Grails just a tiny bit today.  Mostly making documentation for myself on how to use Grails in comparison to Rails which I have been using for several months now.

January 22, 2009: Back to Warren Today

I was really exhausted this morning when I pulled myself out of bed.  Alternating shifts are hard to handle.  I would prefer always being on one shift or another.  Work started today at six thirty in the morning.  The basement is very cold all day long but first thing in the morning it is positively freezing.

I worked for several hours and then, at ten thirty, I hopped into the Protege 5 and drove out to Warren, New Jersey to work from that office for the day.  This is my first time driving to Warren from Peekskill.  The trip took ninety minutes.  A pretty long commute to do by car.

I discovered when I arrived in Warren that it has been so long since I have last been out that way that my badge had been deactivated.  So I had to be signed in for a change.

I was at the office for about half an hour before the team went out for lunch.  I have not seen my team is almost three months which is crazy.  This is the longest that I have gone without seeing the people with whom I work.

For lunch we drove down to Houlihan’s which has awesome stuffed and fried mushrooms and fish tacos that I really like.  It is a common food destination for us.

Overall today was not too busy.  As I always do when in Warren, I spent a bit of the day just going around and catching up with everyone.

We had a pretty major re-organization at work today.  Re-orgs only affect me minimally since I am not an employee but a consultant.  It’s times like this that being a consultant is so much less stressful.  In reality, this particular re-org is probably good for my long term career in the financial industry because it gives me an opportunity to work with the equities business in addition to fixed income in which I have been working for the last three years.

I left Warren at five thirty and got to Peekskill around a quarter after seven or maybe a little later.  The trip back in rush hour was not nearly as the drive in.  On the way home I stopped at Stop and Shop to pick up ingredients for Oreo’s food for the week.

After I returned home we cooked Oreo’s food, ate dinner and watched some of the Mary Tyler Moore show’s third season.

Liesl was excited to see me when I got home but it was not too long before she was asleep.  Oreo was so excited that I had to play with him for several hours.  He really misses me when I am gone.

This evening we finally set up the Wii Fit balance board and tried using the Wii Fit.  We probably put an hour and a half into it between Dominica and I.  In addition to learning how to use it we each set up our profiles and did thirty minutes of exercising.  They do a good job of making the Wii Fit actually give you a work out.  We were both sweating by the time that we were done.  I am going to be soar tomorrow.

I am working the early shift again tomorrow and then working starting at seven in the morning on Saturday.  Later, on Saturday, Jenn and Angelo are coming up from Philadelphia to visit us.  They have not seen the new house or Liesl yet.  Angelo and I have not even had a chance to meet yet.

It was realy late by the time that Dominica and I finally got to bed.  It was probably one in the morning or possibly later.  Another night of practically no sleep for me.

January 21, 2009: Nothing Day

I was happily off of the early shift today.  I am back on tomorrow, off on Friday and then Saturday I am practically back on because I have to start work at seven in the morning.  Work was busy again today, as expected.  Lots to be done.

Extremely little news to report and I am not even going to pretend that there is.  With the changing schedule for me I am pretty tired and am not keeping up well with SGL.  Will try better tomorrow.

Today included: work, watched Hulu, do some Rails troubleshooting.  Bed.

Early shift tomorrow then driving out to Warren for the day.